Pittsburgh Steeler, Terry Long, drifted
into chaos and killed himself four years
ago by drinking antifreeze. Andre Wa-
ters, a former defensive back for the Phil-
adelphia Eagles, sank into depression
and pleaded with his girlfriend-"I need
help, somebody help me"-before shoot-
ing himself in the head. There were men
with aching knees and backs and hands,
from all those years of playing football.
But their real problem was with their
heads, the one part of their body that got
hit over and over again.
"Lately, I've tried to break it down,"
Turley said. "1 remember, every season,
multiple occasions where I'd hit someone
so hard that my eyes went cross-eyed,
and they wouldn't come uncrossed for a
full series of plays. You are just out there,
trying to hit the guy in the middle, be-
cause there are three of them. You don't
remember much. There are the cases
where you hit a guy and you'd get into
a collision where everything goes off.
You're dazed. And there are the others
where you are involved in a big, long
drive. You start on your own five-yard
line, and drive all the way down the
field-fifteen, eighteen plays in a row
sometimes. Every play: collision, colli-
sion, collision. By the time you get to
the other end of the field, you're seeing
spots. You feel like you are going to black
out. Literally, these white explosions-
boom, boom, boom-lights getting dim-
mer and brighter, dimmer and brighter.
'Then, there was the time when I
got knocked unconscious. That was in
St. Louis, in 2003. My wife said that I
was out a minute or two on the field.
But 1 was gone for about four hours after
that. It was the last play of the third
quarter. We were playing the Packers. I
got hit in the back of the head. I saw it
on film a little while afterward. I was
running downfield, made a block on a
guy. We fell to the ground. A guy was
chasing the play, a little guy, a defensive
back, and he jumped over me as I was
coming up, and he kneed me right in
the back of the head. Boom!
"They sat me down on the bench. I
remember Marshall Faulk coming up
and joking with me, because he knew
that I was messed up. That's what hap-
pens in the N .F.L: 'Oooh. You got effed
up. Oooh.' The trainer came up to me
and said, 'Kyle, let's take you to the locker
room.' I remember looking up at a clock,
52 THE NEW YORKER, OCTOBER 19, 2009
and there was only a minute and a half
left in the game-and I had no idea that
much time had elapsed. 1 showered and
took all my gear off. I was sitting at
my locker. I don't remember anything.
When I came back, after being hospital-
ized, the guys were joking with me
because Georgia Frontiere"-then the
, ". hI L
team s owner- came In t e oCKer room,
and they said I was butt-ass naked and I
gave her a big hug. They were dying
laughing, and I was, like, 'Are you seri-
ous? I did that?'
"They cleared me for practice that
Thursday. I probably shouldn't have. I
don't know what damage I did from that,
because my head was really hurting. But
when you're coming off an injury you're
frustrated. I wanted to play the next game.
I was just so mad that this happened to
me that I'm overdoing it. I was just going
after guys in practice. I was really trying
to use my head more, because I was so
frustrated, and the coaches on the side-
lines are, like, 'Yeah. W è re going to win
this game. Hè s going to lead the team.'
That's football. You're told either that
you're hurt or that you're injured. There is
no middle ground. If you are hurt, you
can play. If you are injured, you can't, and
the line is whether you can walk and if
you can put on a helmet and pads."
Turley said that he loved playing
football so much that he would do it all
again. Then he began talking about what
he had gone through in the past year.
The thing that scared him most about
that night at the bar was that it felt ex-
actly like the time he was knocked un-
conscious. "It was identical," he said. "It
was my worst episode ever."
I n August of2007, one of the highest-
paid players in professional football,
the quarterback Michael Vick, pleaded
guilty to involvement in a dogfighting
ring. The police raided one of his prop-
erties, a farm outside Richmond, Vir-
ginia, and found the bodies of dead dogs
buried on the premises, along with evi-
dence that some of the animals there
had been tortured and electrocuted.
Vick was suspended from football. He
was sentenced to twenty-three months
in prison. The dogs on his farm were
seized by the court, and the most dam-
aged were sent to an animal sanctuary in
Utah for rehabilitation. When Vick ap-
plied for reinstatement to the National
Football League, this summer, he was
asked to undergo psychiatric testing. He
then met with the commissioner of the
league, Roger Goodell, for four and a
half hours, so that Goodell could be sure
that he was genuinely remorseful.
"I probably considered every alter-
native that I could think of," Goodell
told reporters, when he finally allowed
Vick back into the league. "1 reached out
to an awful lot of people to get their
views-not only on what was right for
the young man but also what was right
for our society and the N.F.L."
Goodell's job entails dealing with
players who have used drugs, driven
drunk and killed people, fired handguns
in night clubs, and consorted with thugs
and accused murderers. But he clearly
felt what many Americans felt as well-
that dogfighting was a moral offense of a
different order.
Here is a description of a dogfight
given by the sociologists Rhonda Evans
and Craig Forsyth in "The Social Milieu
of Dogmen and Dogfights," an article
they published some years ago in the
journal Deviant Behavior. The fight took
place in Louisiana between a local dog,
Black, owned by a man named L. G., and
Snow, whose owner, Rick, had come
from Arizona:
The handlers release their dogs and Snow
and Black lunge at one another. Snow rears
up and overpowers Black, but Black manages
to come back with a quick locking of the
jaws on Snow's neck. The crowd is cheering
wildly and yelling out bets. Once a dog gets a
lock on the other, they will hold on with all
their might. The dogs flail back and forth and
all the while Black maintains her hold.
In a dogfight, whenever one of the
dogs "turns" -makes a submissive ges-
ture with its head-the two animals
are separated and taken back to their
corners. Each dog, in alternation, then
"scratches"-is released to charge at its
opponent. After that first break, it is
Snows turn to scratch. She races toward
Black:
Snow goes straight for the throat and
grabs hold with her razor-sharp teeth. Almost
immediately, blood flows from Black's throat.
Despite a serious injury to the throat, Black
manages to continue fighting back. They are
relentless, each battling the other and neither
willing to accept defeat. This fighting contin-
ues for an hour. [Finally, the referee] gives the
third and final pit call. It is Black's turn to
scratch and she is severely wounded. Black
manages to crawl across the pit to meet her
opponent. Snow attacks Black and she is too